Labour blogger, radio commentator and political campaigner. Labour made great progress in making the UK fairer while in government. It needs to show the country that it has the ideas to do so again. I am a supporter of Labour winning power as this is the only way to deliver the fairer society I believe in.

The Thick of It

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Saturday, July 10, 2010

The death of the Liberal Democrats?

Former Lib Dem leader of Liverpool council Warren Bradley has said what we all suspect to be true: that in adding their name to the vicious ideological cuts of the Tory government, the Lib Dems have signed their own suicide note. It is not often that I agree with a Lib Dem but I agree with Bradley. There is now no reason for a Lib Dem vote.

Bradley himself said in a letter to the Liverpool Daily Post: "we’re in a weak coalition, that will deliver nothing to the Lib-Dems except total electoral decimation. I give you that absolute guarantee, we will be wiped out by Labour in the North and the Tories in the South, and at last the media will have that two-party system that they have always craved.”

The cancelling of Building Schools for the Future programme was just the sort of once in a lifetime investment that shows Labour was serious about changing the fabric of the country. Bradley says Gove's pre-meditated decision to scrap is made him feel "physically sick". Again we've seen from the Tories that they put short termism first, ideology first and don't care about fairness or planning for the future.

What next for the Lib Dems? Why bother voting for them when they are little more than collaborators in the nastiest government in memory?

"Again we've seen from the Tories that they put short termism first, ideology first and don't care about fairness or planning for the future."

I can swallow short termism and ideology. Just. Although it's not as if Labour weren't spending for short-termist and ideological reasons. But 'planning for the future' is seriously head-in-the-clouds. £150 000 000 000. One hundred and fifty billion pounds. One hundred and fifty thousand million pounds. What kind of 'planning for the future' is that? A future of debt repayment and sovereign debt crisis?

Tim - you need to be honest about the scale of profligacy of the second half of the Labour administration, especially near the end when Brown took over. A government can't take 40% of the economy in taxes and spend 50%. Something has to give. And the utterly discredited BSF programme is as good a place to start as any. If even the chief of the RIBA, an organisation which has a vested interest in over-specified, overly expensive building programmes thinks it was horrendously wasteful, surely you can too?

The problem is that the Lib Dems where not open or honest about which parts of their manifesto where negotiable and which where not. As one Lib Dem voter I can quite categorically say I will never vote for them again and I know many others that hold a simmilar veiw. You just do not know what policies you are voting for.

Brain of Britain? Arena Magazine article

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About Me

I am a South London Labour Party member. I've been a political campaigner and candidate for Labour.
This is a Labour and party political blog. It features in the Total Politics top 75 Labour Blogs 2011. I was also named one of the ten cleverest men in Britain by historian and MP Tristram Hunt for this blog.
I regularly comment on political issues here and for BBC national and local radio, LBC and BBC TV.
I help brands make sense of social media at advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi. This blog reflects my views, not theirs.